Adulterous play entertains despite fire alarm

“Same Time, Next Year” by Bernard Slade is a different, feel-good kind of adultery. 
The set and premise are simple: A man and woman meet in a Californian seaside cottage for extramarital sex and conversation one day a year for 24 years. 

The play is split into two acts, each consisting of three scenes, and each scene takes place about five years apart.
It begins in the dawn of the 50s and drifts through the next two and a half decades, which means you spend a lot of time on stage with just the man and the woman. That’s not a bad thing.

This journey of time, not space, is helped along by a huge screen on the back wall of the cottage, which most of the time illustrates a painting of the ocean, but, when accompanied by era-specific music, provides contextual pop-cultural images signifying passing years between scenes.

This is a fine idea, if not a little obtuse at times. It gives the audience something to look at while necessary backstage preparations are made. It’s better that than the audience sitting in uncomfortable, dark silence. 

But how the screen was first executed at the top of the show was rather strange. The house music, old-timey and soft, is faded and the play begins with the entrance of an uncredited maid character who switches the radio to the most bizarre, jarring music. She begins littering the space with clothing. The painting then begins a slow, awkward slideshow of a man and woman doing nearly nothing.
Why the clothes couldn’t have been set before the show is inexplicable, other than allowing the maid something to do while the audience watches a series on nonsensical slides with no context.

That done, the first scene opens to the couple, “George” (Vernon Poitras) and “Doris” (Tawni Waters), waking up in bed together, and the audience begins to grasp the shape of the epic journey through life it is about to undertake with these two people. 
It starts slow, and the opening scene is weak, listing mostly details about the characters’ personal and separate married lives. Despite its weakness, this is the starting point from which their dynamic narratives begin. 

Scene II jumps four years ahead, with both George and Doris still mostly unchanged, but they begin laying the foundation for their recurring discussions centralized on their guilt and love and the problems of maintaining such an unorthodox affair in the form of an extended relationship.
Except not for very long, because then the fire alarm goes off.

Actors and audience alike freeze. The wonder ends when Poitras turns directly to the audience.
“Unfortunately, this is real,” he says, which elicits a laugh, and the audience files out of the theater.
After waiting in the parking lot, the stage manager informs the audience that there is, in fact, no fire at all. Patrons file back into the theater, where Scene II begins again from the top, the audience applauding George’s reentrance. 

Personal evolution is a central theme here, with both characters changing, growing and receding, and then changing again in each passing scene. Credited largely to the challenging performances of Poitras and Waters, the subtle changes are more interesting. George, unmanageably gawky and young, slowly grows a pair before our very eyes. Doris begins as a simple woman without a high school diploma, but bit by bit crawls her way up the ranks of education until she discovers her natural talent for business. 

Each fundamental difference occurring in the characters per half decade was rather flat and ordinary.
For example, after the second intermission, Act II opens in mid 60s and the Vietnam War, the duo find themselves at odds with Doris becoming a full-blown hippie and George as a stiff-necked conservative.

In the next scene, five years later, the tables have somewhat turned, with Doris a liberated business woman obsessed with “The Deal,” and George wearing bellbottoms and talking about feelings. 

One character matures while the other falls back; then in five years, the reverse. They always complement each other, sometimes in an obvious political way, but sometimes more subtle — one fertile, one impotent. And in the end, the audience cares about what happens to each of them.
This ebb and flow is the human condition, and it is what “Same Time, Next Year” is all about.